House of Commons - Public Accounts

Select Committee on Public Accounts Fifty-Ninth Report

4 Dealing with deep rooted failure

26. School leaders and governors should be aiming to achieve continuous improvement in their schools. The Department, Ofsted and local authorities have a responsibility to support and challenge all schools to drive continuous improvement, and local authorities have a particular responsibility towards schools that are in difficulty, including supporting schools that go into Special Measures.[33]

27. The most difficult schools to turn around are those that have struggled with poor performance over a long period and may have been in Ofsted categories for over two years. These schools often have difficulty recruiting and retaining good staff and have high rates of pupil absence and poor standards of behaviour. It is nevertheless essential that schools in Special Measures recover as quickly as possible to avoid further disruption to pupils' education and to remove the stigma for staff, pupils and parents that comes from having a poorly performing school. The Department proposes that schools must be showing significant signs of improvement within twelve months, otherwise they should be considered for closure. Ofsted considers that if a school does not demonstrate significant improvement within a year, for example based on more effective leadership, improved pupil attendance and better attitudes to behaviour, it is likely, based on Ofsted's experience, to take a long time to recover.[34]

28. Primary schools currently take an average of 20 months to recover from Special Measures and secondary schools take an average of 22 months. Some schools placed in Special Measures are 'in denial' and do not immediately accept the Ofsted judgment, which can make recovery much slower. School improvement has to be driven from within the school, so where a school does accept the judgement, plans for improvement can be put in place more quickly. Ofsted considers that the new inspection regime, with faster reporting and more frequent monitoring, will help schools to improve more quickly.[35]

29. Schools can draw support from a variety of sources, including the Department, local authorities, governors, parents, local businesses and other schools. Some local authorities are better than others at preventing school decline - a large minority (56 out of 150) had no schools in Special Measures at July 2005. Local authorities have powers to intervene, but they are rarely used. The Department expects local authorities to intervene where necessary, using their powers sensitively and sensibly, and to identify external support, for example from businesses or universities, to help the school to improve. The Department is providing additional funding to support local authorities in using their powers to intervene in schools that are in difficulty.[36]

30. Collaboration between schools can help improve poor performance through sharing good practice and sometimes facilities and resources. Local authorities can help by facilitating links between schools. The Department encourages schools to join federations and its Leadership Incentive Grant promotes the creation of school networks. Though current arrangements tend to be ad hoc, the Department considers that the vast majority of successful schools do take their responsibilities to other schools seriously, and there are opportunities to sustain strong collaboration.[37]

31. For schools in challenging areas, the teaching needs to be very good to enable pupils to make good progress. The Department has a number of programmes in place for schools with the most intractable problems and those in the most challenging areas. Poorly performing schools can exhibit different problems depending on their circumstances, so it is important to have a range of options for improving performance.[38]

32. The Department's Excellence in Cities programme aims to raise educational standards and promote social inclusion in major cities and areas that face similar problems. A 2003 Ofsted evaluation of the Excellence in Cities programme found it was making an important difference to schools in disadvantaged areas, though it had been more successful in improving the results of primary schools than secondary schools, where pupils often have accumulated years of low attainment, and the social factors that contribute to low attainment are more complex. Nevertheless, the proportion of pupils achieving 5 A*-C GCSEs or more in Excellence in Cities schools increased by around 4 percentage points in 2005, compared with a national increase of 2.6 percentage points.[39]

33. The Leadership Incentive Grant is intended to help leadership teams in secondary schools in challenging circumstances to improve the delivery of education so that pupils are not disadvantaged. It is available to schools in an Excellence in Cities area; to schools with less than 30% of pupils achieving 5 A*-C GCSEs; and to schools with more than 35% of pupils receiving free school meals. The grant focuses on collaboration between schools as a means of achieving improvement. The percentage of pupils achieving 5 A*-C GCSEs in Leadership Incentive Grant collaborative schools increased by around 4 percentage points in 2005.[40]

34. The Department has two school renewal programmes that involve the most radical and expensive option of closing a school and replacing it with a new school with a new name. Both are intended to improve schools where all other efforts at recovery have failed. Under the Fresh Start programme, the school is closed then re-opened with refurbished facilities and major changes or additions to staff. Establishing a Fresh Start school costs on average around £2.2 million in a mixture of capital and revenue costs. Under the Academies Programme, academies usually open in new buildings, and therefore involve substantially more expenditure. The Department estimates that the capital cost of a new-build 1,300 pupil academy is around £27 million, and that academies cost around £4 million more than similar-sized secondary schools to be built under the Building Schools for the Future programme. Pupil attainment in schools on these programmes usually starts from a very low point, so while attainment is improving in most cases, most are still achieving well below national average attainment.[41]

35. As of September 2006 there will be 51 Fresh Start schools (27 secondary, 23 primary and one special school).[42] The programme has not been formally evaluated. On average, the 27 secondary schools are performing better than their predecessor schools in terms of GCSE results. Based on GCSE results in 2004, pupils in the nine Fresh Start secondary schools that had reached their fifth year performed, on average, twice as well as pupils in the predecessor schools in terms of the proportion of pupils achieving 5 A*-C GCSEs or more.[43]

36. The first three academies opened in September 2002, and 27 were open by September 2005. The Department plans to have 200 academies open or in development by 2010. Of the 14 academies whose pupils took GCSEs in 2005, ten achieved a higher percentage of pupils achieving 5 A*-C GCSEs or more than in 2004, and 12 achieved better results than the predecessor schools. Two academies have received poor inspection results; Unity City Academy and the Business Academy in Bexley. Unity City Academy was inspected in 2005. Findings that included unsatisfactory leadership, a poor quality of teaching, low pupil attendance and a substantial financial deficit led Ofsted to place the academy in Special Measures. Ofsted gave the Business Academy, Bexley a Notice to Improve in 2005, when inspectors concluded that significant improvements were needed in the quality of teaching and learning and the effectiveness of the sixth form.[44]

37. The Department has commissioned PricewaterhouseCoopers to carry out a five-year evaluation of the Academies Programme. The second annual evaluation report was broadly positive about early progress, such as innovative approaches to teaching the curriculum and the role of academy principals. The evaluation also highlighted that some schools faced challenges, such as tackling bullying and the need to make sure that new academy buildings were able to meet the practical requirements of teaching and learning.[45]

33 C&AG's Report, para 5 and Figure 2; Q 4 Back

34 C&AG's Report, paras 16-17, 2.16-2.17 and Figure 29; Qq 5, 16, 22, 26, 36-37 Back

35 C&AG's Report, para 1.30; Qq 8, 15, 22-24 Back

36 C&AG's Report, paras 1.27-1.30 and Figure 18; Qq 24-25, 33 Back

37 C&AG's Report, paras 2.37-2.40; Qq 38-39 Back

38 Qq 5, 20 Back

39 C&AG's Report, para 1.37 and Appendix 2; Qq 116-117; Department for Education and Skills press release www.dfes.gov.uk/pns/DisplayPN.cgi?pn_id=2006_0003 Back

40 C&AG's Report, Appendix 2; Department for Education and Skills press release www.dfes.gov.uk/pns/DisplayPN.cgi?pn_id=2006_0003 Back

41 C&AG's Report, paras 19-20, 21, 23 and Figure 8; Qq 112-113 Back

42 This number includes five 'Collaborative Restart' schools, which are Fresh Start schools with an emphasis on collaboration with successful neighbouring schools. Back

43 C&AG's Report, paras 2.45-2.46 and Figure 30 Back

44 C&AG's Report, paras 20, 2.47 and Case Study 7 on p47; Qq 87, 112-113; Ofsted inspection reports, 2005, www.ofsted.gov.uk/reports/manreports/2661.pdf, www.ofsted.gov.uk/reports/133/s5_133769_20051123.htm Back